{"id":1356,"date":"2021-04-23T13:44:45","date_gmt":"2021-04-23T13:44:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/?p=1356"},"modified":"2025-08-07T18:24:51","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T18:24:51","slug":"hortense-spillers-elected-to-the-american-academy-of-arts-and-sciences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/hortense-spillers-elected-to-the-american-academy-of-arts-and-sciences\/","title":{"rendered":"Hortense Spillers elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences"},"content":{"rendered":"

Congratulations to Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor Hortense Spillers for her election tot he American Academy of Arts and Sciences. To see all newly elected members, click here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hortense J. Spillers Biography:<\/p>\n

\"HortenseHaving taught in the U.S. academy for three decades now (and counting), I am reluctant to look back for all those mythical reasons that warn against the backward glance. (I never figured out why doing so might turn one into a pillar of salt, but it is alleged from quite reputable sources to have happened to at least one person!) In any case, when I conjure up 1974, when I started post-doc teaching at Wellesley College, I always find something to cut the memory short, since remembering is to suggest that you have more past than future, but it doesn\u2019t feel so to me at all. Actually, I feel as though I\u2019m just getting started good! \u00a0Though I think I wouldn\u2019t have been half bad at either, I am nevertheless grateful to myself that I didn\u2019t pursue a career in the practice of law, or tv\/radio broadcasting, having spent my last two years in undergraduate school at the University of Memphis as a disc jockey at WDIA radio in Memphis. This historic organization\u2014among the first, if not the dead absolute first, all-black radio station in the United States\u2014might have been my launching pad, I\u2019d hoped, to a career in national news; as I recall, I was preparing to take the broadcasters\u2019 examination, administered by the Feds (and the equivalent of our SATs, or in those days, CEEBs) and about to cut a tape, at their request,\u00a0 to post to the executives who ran WHER in Memphis\u2014the first all-woman radio station in the country, I think. But after all that, William Blake\u2019s prophetic books won the charm offensive! Is that not a surprise, or what! Not many things were more interesting to me then than Walter Cronkite, Pauline Fredrick, and Edward R. Morrow, unless it was \u201cVala, or the Four Zoas\u201d! And one thing led to another and another and finally a career of literary and cultural interrogation that has taken me literally from my birthplace on the southern tier to the East and Mid-West of the country and several decades later, back again. It would be an understatement to assert that it is not today the same South from which I departed my parents\u2019 driveway in my little Buick Skylark, three months after MLK\u2019s assassination, enroute to Boston and Brandeis.\u00a0 The changes have been momentous for everyone and precisely frame my own professional development.<\/p>\n

Try to imagine this: I hired someone to type my doctoral dissertation, though I was competent enough to have done it myself. But one hired out the work before computers because the professional typist was expected to be very fast, very capable, and expert at the proper formatting. You did everything else. The distance that separates the mid-70s from the turn-of-the-century world is a matter of light years, but I wonder how we are doing today with an old-fashioned aim in mind, and that is to say, teaching reading and writing in the age of twitter, although we apply far fancier names to what we do. It is likely that I wrote my dissertation on the rhetoric of black sermons by hand first, then made a rough copy of it on my Olivetti, then gave the secretary the rough draft from which to make the perfect draft. I think I paid the lady $200.00 and change, as the first \u201creal\u201d painting I bought from the same era\u2014a striking head of Miles Davis on a black ground– cost five hundred. Living in Haverford rather than Philly, Ithaca rather than the Big Apple, not taking a job in Chicago, but staying in central New York, I survived the 80s, 90s, and the new millennium; what bothers me now is that we haven\u2019t figured out yet the implications of inflated costs, e.g;, that of higher education and the speeds that are supposed to match the global flows of capital.\u00a0 I think we need to spend a little time trying to\u00a0imagine what all the latter mean to and for the tasks of higher education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Congratulations to Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor Hortense Spillers for her election tot he American Academy of Arts and Sciences. To see all newly elected members, click here.\u00a0 Hortense J. Spillers Biography: Having taught in the U.S. academy for three decades now (and counting), I am reluctant to look back for all those mythical reasons that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":1357,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[5],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/vu-cas\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/10\/2021\/04\/23133840\/Hortense-Spillers-Spotlight.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1356"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1356"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1359,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1356\/revisions\/1359"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}